Happy Birthday to Us

Okay, so I'm a week late. I just came across this thought, from Douglas McBain and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

America, in its heart and soul, is little more than an idea. Any state, of whatever stripe, can have defined borders, an army, a currency and the machinery of government -- but America was born of something more than this sort of prosaic chemistry of nations. At its beginning, America was a dream made by dreamers -- that man can govern himself and order his affairs according to an ethos that recognizes the fundamental dignity of his fellow man and entrusts to each of its citizens the responsibility to see that such dignity is ensured to all.

It's ironic that the government that should be serving this great purpose is instead working, at the hands of those who have no learning or regard for their own origins, to dismantle and destroy, under the guise of national security and ownership society, so much that was so painstakingly created over a span of more than 200 years.

When the commonweal is so threatened, when our form of government is so assaulted from within, what responsibility do we have to act? This is a question to ask ourselves, not in the abstract but in the most concrete and immediate terms. The threat to our democracy, to our way of life, and to the simple human values on which this country was so courageously founded, is not hypothetical -- it is all too real -- read about it in the headlines of this newspaper.

What has happened to our sense of moral right, our sense of public responsibility, our commitment to human dignity? What has happened to our own self-respect?